The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#2351
Robert Lee Grossman
#57233
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
#2352
Martin L. Kersten
#28483
Overall Influence
1953 - 2022 (69 years)
Martin L. Kersten was a computer scientist with research focus on database architectures, query optimization and their use in scientific databases. He was an architect of the MonetDB system, an open-source column store for data warehouses, online analytical processing and geographic information systems . He has been founder of several successful spin-offs of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica .
Go to Profile#2353
Hans Hagen
#62604
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Hans Hagen is a professor of computer science at the University of Kaiserslautern. His main research interests are scientific visualization and geometric modelling. From 1999 to 2003 he was the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Go to Profile#2354
Erez Lieberman Aiden
#22167
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (44 years)
Erez Lieberman Aiden is an American research scientist active in multiple fields related to applied mathematics. He is an associate professor at the Baylor College of Medicine, and formerly a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and visiting faculty member at Google. He is an adjunct assistant professor of computer science at Rice University. Using mathematical and computational approaches, he has studied evolution in a range of contexts, including that of networks through evolutionary graph theory and languages in the field of culturomics. He has published scientific articles in a variet...
Go to Profile#2355
Sanjiv Sam Gambhir
#57619
Overall Influence
1961 - 2020 (59 years)
Sanjiv Sam Gambhir was an American physician–scientist. He was the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a professor by courtesy in the departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Additionally, he served as the Director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford , Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center . He authored 680 publications and had over 40 patents pending or granted.
Go to Profile#2356
Thomas Roth
#71629
Overall Influence
#2357
John M. Hollerbach
#32595
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
John Matthew Hollerbach is a professor of computer science and research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He is the editor of The International Journal of Robotics Research, a Senior Editor of Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, and a Governing Board member of the electronic journal Haptics-e.
Go to Profile#2358
Yoichiro Kawaguchi
#62878
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
is a Japanese computer graphics artist and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo. Kawaguchi rose to international prominence in 1982 when he presented "Growth Model" in the international conference SIGGRAPH.
Go to Profile#2359
Franz Guenthner
#38097
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Franz Guenthner is a German linguist who is a professor of Computational Linguistics at the Center for Information and Language Processing at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, Germany. His background is in philosophy and linguistics.
Go to Profile#2360
Doug Stinson
#49618
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Douglas Robert Stinson is a Canadian mathematician and cryptographer, currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Waterloo. Stinson received his B.Math from the University of Waterloo in 1978, his M.Sc. from Ohio State University in 1980, and his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo in 1981. He was at the University of Manitoba from 1981 to 1989, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1990 to 1998. In 2011 he was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Go to Profile#2361
Zoë Quinn
#18841
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
Zoë Tiberius Quinn is an American video game developer, programmer, and writer. Quinn developed the interactive fiction game Depression Quest, which was released in 2013. In 2014, a defamatory blog post by their ex-boyfriend sparked the online harassment campaign known as Gamergate, during which Quinn was subjected to extensive harassment including doxing, rape threats, and death threats. The following year, Quinn co-founded Crash Override, a crisis hotline and resource center for victims of online harassment.
Go to Profile#2362
Yongfang Li
#71868
Overall Influence
#2363
Holly Rushmeier
#55891
Overall Influence
Holly Rushmeier is an American computer scientist and is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. She is known for her contributions to the field of computer graphics. Biography Rushmeier has received three degrees in mechanical engineering from Cornell University: the B.S. in 1977, the M.S. in 1986, and the Ph.D. in 1988. Before returning to graduate school in 1983, she worked in Seattle as an engineer at Boeing Commercial Airplanes and Washington Natural Gas.
Go to Profile#2364
Jean-Jacques Quisquater
#57124
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Jean-Jacques Quisquater is a Belgian cryptographer and a professor at University of Louvain . He received, with Claus P. Schnorr, the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics in 2013, and the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award 2013.
Go to Profile#2365
Alan H. Borning
#64427
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alan H. Borning is an American Computer Scientist noted for his research on human computer interaction and object-oriented programming. In particular his research in human-computer interaction is on designing for human values. He works on systems to support civic engagement and deliberation, and works on tools to make public transportation easier to use. He has also worked on constraint-based languages and systems, and cooperating constraint languages and solvers.
Go to Profile#2366
Jakob Nielsen
#65365
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jakob Nielsen is a Danish web usability consultant, human–computer interaction researcher, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group. He was named the “guru of Web page usability” in 1998 by The New York Times and the “king of usability” by Internet Magazine.
Go to Profile#2367
Dawson Engler
#58116
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dawson R. Engler is an American computer scientist and an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. Career After graduating from University of Arizona, Engler earned his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998 while working with Frans Kaashoek in the MIT CSAIL Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems Group. The focus of his graduate studies was the exokernel.
Go to Profile#2368
Asuman Özdağlar
#25117
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Asuman "Asu" Özdağlar is a Turkish academic. Early life She was born to İsmail Özdağlar and Zahide Özdağlar on December 16, 1974. Her father İsmail Özdağlar was a former Minister of State, between December 13, 1983 and January 15, 1985 in the 45th government of Turkey, who was convicted and jailed of misuse of ministerial powers.
Go to Profile#2369
Brigitte Plateau
#50267
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Brigitte Plateau is a French computer scientist. A former student of the École Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-aux-Roses majoring in Mathematics , she is a Doctor of Information Studies. A University Professor at Grenoble Institute of Technology since 1988, since February 2012 she has been the General Administrator of the Grenoble INP cluster.
Go to Profile#2370
Theo Bemelmans
#39265
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Theodore Aloysius Maria Bemelmans is a Dutch computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Administrative Information Systems and Automation at the Eindhoven University of Technology. Biography Born in Heerlen, Bemelmans in 1962 started to study Econometrics at the Tilburg University, where he received his MA in 1968. Later in 1976 there he also received his PhD with a thesis entitled "Researchplanning in de Onderneming" under supervision of Piet A. Verheyen and Wim van Hulst.
Go to Profile#2371
Ralf Steinmetz
#50118
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Ralf Steinmetz is a German computer scientist and electrical engineer. He is professor of multimedia communication at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. In the eighties Steinmetz coined and sharpened the term multimedia. He did fundamental work in the field of the perception of synchronicity in multimedia flows. At TU Darmstadt Steinmetz is working on realizing truly seamless multimedia communication. His research interests include communication services, IT architectures, knowledge media, mobile networking, networked gaming, network mechanisms & quality of service, peer-to-peer networking...
Go to Profile#2372
Daniel Gajski
#37035
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Daniel Gajski is a Professor of the School of Information and Computer Science and the School of Engineering at University of California, Irvine, United States. He was previously the Director for the Center for Embedded Computer Systems , now known as the Center for Embedded and Cyber-physical Systems.
Go to Profile#2373
Rakesh Kumar Agrawal
#72038
Overall Influence
#2374
Dana S. Nau
#49001
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Dana S. Nau is a Professor of Computer Science and Systems Research at the University of Maryland Department of Computer Science in College Park, where he has done research in automated planning and scheduling, game theory, cognitive science, and computer-aided engineering. He has many PHD students, including Qiang Yang who graduated in 1989. He has more than 300 publications and several best-paper awards. Some of his accomplishments include the discovery of game tree pathology, the development of the SHOP and SHOP2 HTN planning systems, and the book Automated Planning: Theory and Practice . ...
Go to Profile#2375
Jacob Lawrence
#4030
Overall Influence
1917 - 2000 (83 years)
Jacob Armstead Lawrence was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism," an art form popularized in Europe which drew great inspiration from West African and Meso-American art. For his compositions, Lawrence found inspiration in everyday life in Harlem. He brought the African-American experience to life using blacks and browns juxtaposed with vivid colors. He also taught and spent 16 years as a professor at the University of Washington.
Go to Profile#2376
Brian Reffin Smith
#28422
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Brian Reffin Smith is an artist, writer, teacher and musician born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in the United Kingdom, who won the first-ever Prix Ars Electronica, the Golden Nica, in Linz, Austria, 1987. He lives in Berlin, Germany.
Go to Profile#2377
Michael Jonathan Davies
#72092
Overall Influence
#2378
Longbing Cao
#56201
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Longbing Cao is an AI and data science researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. His broad research interest involves artificial intelligence, data science, behavior informatics, and their enterprise applications.
Go to Profile#2379
Keith W. Ross
#43338
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Keith W. Ross is an American scholar of computer science whose research has focused on Markov decision processes, queuing theory, computer networks, peer-to-peer networks, Internet privacy, social networks, and deep reinforcement learning. He is the Dean of Engineering and Computer Science at NYU Shanghai and a computer science professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.
Go to Profile#2380
Yehoshua Sagiv
#58233
Overall Influence
Yehoshua Chaim Sagiv is a computer scientist and professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He obtained his PhD at Princeton University in 1978. His advisor was Jeffrey Ullman.
Go to Profile#2381
Anne Condon
#39106
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anne Elizabeth Condon, is an Irish-Canadian computer scientist, professor, and former head of the Computer Science Department of the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on computational complexity theory, DNA computing, and bioinformatics. She has also held the NSERC/General Motors Canada Chair for Women in Science and Engineering from 2004 to 2009, and has worked to improve the success of women in the sciences and engineering.
Go to Profile#2382
Tarn Adams
#37493
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
Tarn Adams is an American computer game programmer, best known for his work on Dwarf Fortress. He has been working on the game since 2002 together with his older brother Zach. He learned programming in his childhood, and took up designing computer games as a hobby. In 2006, he quit during his first year of a mathematics post doctorate at Texas A&M University to focus on game development.
Go to Profile#2383
Laurie Hendren
#62395
Overall Influence
1958 - 2019 (61 years)
Laurie Hendren was a Canadian computer scientist noted for her research in programming languages and compilers. Biography Hendren received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science from Queen's University, Kingston in 1982 and 1984 respectively. She received a Ph.D in computer science from Cornell University in 1990.
Go to Profile#2384
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
#48640
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon is a French computer scientist working in the field of human–computer interaction. He received his PhD from the Paris-Sud 11 University in 1985. He is currently professor of computer science at Paris-Sud 11 University since 1992 and was director of LRI, the laboratory for computer science, from 2002 to 2009.
Go to Profile#2385
Alan Cobham
#47356
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
Alan Belmont Cobham was an American mathematician and computer scientist known for inventing the notion of polynomial time and the complexity class P, for Cobham's thesis stating that the problems that have practically usable computer solutions are characterized by having polynomial time, and for Cobham's theorem on the sets of numbers that can be recognized by finite automata. He also did foundational work on automatic sequences, invented priority queues and studied them from the point of view of queueing theory, and wrote a program for playing contract bridge that was at the time one of t...
Go to Profile#2386
David Salle
#9657
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
David Salle is an American Postmodern painter, printmaker, photographer, and stage designer. Salle was born in Norman, Oklahoma, and lives and works in East Hampton, New York. He earned a BFA and MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California, where he studied with John Baldessari. Salle’s work first came to public attention in New York City in the early 1980s.
Go to Profile#2387
Owen Holland
#22559
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Owen Holland is professor emeritus of cognitive robotics in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He was until recently a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, England. Previously, he has held faculty positions at Caltech, University of Bielefeld, Starlab and the University of the West of England.
Go to Profile#2388
Brian E. Henderson
#72505
Overall Influence
1937 - 2015 (78 years)
#2389
Rajeev Rastogi
#48932
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Rajeev Ramnarain Rastogi is an Indian computer scientist who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where he got his Bachelor of Science degree in 1988. He received his Master's and Doctoral degrees from the University of Texas in 1990, and 1993 respectively. Rastogi was born on August 6, 1967.
Go to Profile#2390
John A. Stankovic
#66616
Overall Influence
John Anthony Stankovic is an American computer scientist. He is currently the BP America Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia and the director of the Link Lab at the university's School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Go to Profile#2391
Willy Susilo
#63186
Overall Influence
Willy Susilo is an Australian cybersecurity scientist and cryptographer. He is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Computing and Information Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences University of Wollongong, Australia.
Go to Profile#2392
Richard Buckingham
#36484
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Richard Arthur Buckingham FBCS FRSA was an English particle physicist, mathematician and computer scientist long on the staff of the University of London. He was also a Fellow of the British Computer Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and chaired the Technical Committee for Education of the International Federation for Information Processing. He was also the originator of the Buckingham potential formula.
Go to Profile#2393
Phil Husbands
#58121
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Phil Husbands is a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the English University of Sussex, situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. He is head of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group and co-director of the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics . Husbands is also one of the founders of the field of evolutionary robotics.
Go to Profile#2394
Maria Petrou
#30706
Overall Influence
1953 - 2012 (59 years)
Maria Petrou FREng was a Greek-born British scientist who specialised in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine vision. She developed a number of novel image recognition techniques, taught at Surrey University and Imperial College London, and was a prolific author of scientific articles.
Go to Profile#2395
Jack Yang
#30312
Overall Influence
Jack Y. Yang is an American computer scientist and biophysicist. As of 2011, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computational Biology and Drug Design. Biography Yang received his Ph.D. and MS degrees from Purdue University, West Lafayette, under the supervision of Okan Ersoy and Albert Overhauser , receiving the grade of summa cum laude and the award of Ph.D. thesis of the year in the USA. His post-doctoral training was from Harvard Medical School and Indiana University School of Medicine, and he received training in biostatistics and bioinformatics from Johns Hopkins University, and in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Go to Profile#2396
Antonio B. Torralba
#72749
Overall Influence
#2397
Reuven Rubinstein
#43094
Overall Influence
1938 - 2012 (74 years)
Reuven Rubinstein was an Israeli scientist known for his contributions to Monte Carlo simulation, applied probability, stochastic modeling, and stochastic optimization, having authored more than one hundred papers and six books.
Go to Profile#2398
Michal Parnas
#63950
Overall Influence
Michal Parnas is an Israeli theoretical computer scientist known for her work on property testing and sublinear-time algorithms. She is a professor of computer science at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo in Israel, where she was a founding faculty member and was also the dean of the school of computer science from 2011 to 2016. Since October 2022 she is the vice president of academic affairs of the college.
Go to Profile#2399
Paddy Nixon
#19949
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Paddy Nixon is a computer scientist and Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra, in Australia. He took up office in April 2020. From July 2015 to January 2021, he was Vice-Chancellor and President of Ulster University and on the board of Universities UK, chair of Universities Ireland and was on the Northern Ireland Council of the Confederation of British Industry. Prior to that he was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Tasmania.
Go to Profile#2400
William J. Kettinger
#33141
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
William J. Kettinger an American computer scientist and is the William S. Lee Distinguished Professor in Management Information Systems at Clemson University, known for his work in the field of business process modelling and business process reengineering.
Go to Profile